Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Ellen Barkin Is No Uptown Girl

Ellen Barkin led me up the stairs so I could see her bedroom. She was chatty in the way you’d expect Ellen Barkin to be — sort of tough yet sort of warm, sort of open, sort of closed. We had already talked for more than an hour, and this was a gesture of good will on her part, a way of saying, “Even though you are a reporter and have the ability to ruin my week or month or year with an untoward phrase, I’m going to pre-empt you, rise to the occasion and open my home. I’ll show you more than the living room with the white goatskin rugs and original white leather Eames chairs, the ‘public’ room of my West Village town house.”

Once we were in her bedroom, it wasn’t the hundreds of DVDs that got my attention. It was the smell.

“Like the Upper East Side,” I said, sniffing.

Looking stricken, she blew out the scented candles near her bed, even as she said, “I’m a big candle person.” Well, O.K. I wasn’t complaining, just observing. But I might as well have pinched her. I hadn’t realized that “Upper East Side” was a code-red term — that even five years after her contentious divorce from the Revlon chairman, Ronald O. Perelman, it lives side by side with the detestable “trophy wife.” I had touched a fragrant nerve.

The truth is, I hadn’t expected to. Barkin, who turned 57 on April 16, is the quintessential New York broad, radiating sex and scrappiness. Born in the Bronx to a father who worked as a Fuller Brush man and part-time usher at Yankee Stadium and a mother who was a medical secretary, she and her brother were raised in Queens. Barkin graduated from the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan, even though her teachers advised her parents to take her out of school because she wasn’t “pretty enough” and had “very little talent and no spark.” It took her years to recover from that assessment, but once she did, she was cast in Barry Levinson’s “Diner” and found enough spark to burn up the screen with Dennis Quaid in “The Big Easy” and Al Pacino in “Sea of Love.” She married the Irish heartthrob Gabriel Byrne in 1988 and had two children with him before they divorced in 1999. (They remain friends.) Then, at 45, not exactly prime time for women in Hollywood, Barkin became Perelman’s fourth wife, after he met her at the Vanity Fair Oscar party and said, “So are you married or single or what?” Some people are just suckers for poetry.

After six years of what was (endlessly) depicted in the press as a turbulent marriage, Perelman, whose worth was estimated by Forbes this year at $12 billion, initiated divorce proceedings in January 2006, blindsiding Barkin. He completed them on Feb. 14, just in time for Valentine’s Day. The account in The Independent in Ireland (which seems to take a proprietary interest in Barkin because of Byrne) read: “Insiders said the tough-skinned corporate raider callously acted with such speed to avoid the looming financial penalties inherent in the renegotiation of the couple’s prenup, which was literally days from its expiry date.” In Hollywood parlance, this is known as “getting Cruised,” since similar motives were attributed, sotto voce, to Tom Cruise in his speedy divorce from Nicole Kidman.

After Perelman served Barkin with papers, he had security guards supervise her as she removed her possessions from their town house in a scenario more akin to being fired from a corporation than to ending a marriage. It has been widely reported that Barkin had to make do with $20 million, though some reports place the figure higher. But our plucky heroine sweetened the deal by selling the jewelry Perelman gave her (more than 100 pieces, including her wedding ring) at auction at Christie’s, for $20.3 million. When I walked with Barkin on the streets of New York, every middle-aged woman we passed beamed at her, nodded at her, smiled at her, motioned a thumbs up: Norma Rae for the Temple Emanu-El set.

Photo

Credit
Eric Ogden for The New York Times

Given that she made such a bold move, I expected Barkin to be militant about it. But as with anyone who has endured a trauma, especially one so public and vituperative, the line between sure and shaken can’t help being breached; every action, inadvertently or not, becomes a reaction. The dual aspects of flinty and vulnerable that color Barkin’s performances on screen are left to do serious combat off screen as she strives, still, for equilibrium.

Though the divorce was finalized five years ago, litigation has continued on other fronts; last December an appeals court ruled against Perelman, ending a lengthy dispute over the production company they started during their marriage. He was ordered to pay her $4.3 million. That victory only made her more cautious about not violating the confidentiality agreement from her divorce settlement, which is why she couldn’t answer my 10,000 questions on the subject, including whether it was true that Perelman discouraged her from working during their marriage.

“As a woman, these are things you’d like to talk through,” she acknowledged. “But this is an area of my life I’m not allowed to do that with. All I can say is I was extremely naïve for someone who considers herself to be a very smart, savvy, cynical New York broad.”

She couldn’t even comment on the account in The New York Post of the night at the Waverly Inn, after their divorce, when Perelman approached her table and she threw a glass of water in his face?

She sighed. “Do you want me to go jail?” she said. “Look, it’s a fact. It happened and it was in print. You know, I had a very bad time in high school, and all I thought about when I was a young actor was, How good am I going to have to be before they stop asking me what happened in high school? They didn’t. So finally I’d just say, ‘I’m 35 years old, I don’t want to talk about high school anymore.’ I look forward to the day when I’m not asked about this anymore.”

Well, the good news is that Barkin has plenty else to talk about. Her first job, post-Perelman, was in “Ocean’s Thirteen,” and she had just returned from filming a pilot in Los Angeles for NBC, written and directed by Michael Patrick King (“Sex and the City”), in which she plays the ex-wife, conscience and better half of a playboy hair-salon owner (Don Johnson). She produced and starred in the independent film “Another Happy Day,” written and directed by Sam Levinson (Barry’s 26-year-old son), which won the screenwriting award at this year’s Sundance Festival. And on April 27, she will make her Broadway debut in Larry Kramer’s “Normal Heart.” The 1985 watershed drama about the early days of the AIDS crisis in New York is also having its Broadway debut, having been produced twice Off Broadway. Joe Mantello plays Ned Weeks, the AIDS activist character based on Kramer. The play is co-directed by Joel Grey and George C. Wolfe, who won a Tony Award for “Angels in America.”

“Ellen is gutsy and classy and embodies many qualities of the real person she’s playing,” Kramer told me, referring to Dr. Linda Laubenstein, the crusading doctor from N.Y.U. Medical Center who advocated so vociferously on behalf of her gay male patients that she was known as “the holy terror in the wheelchair” (she had polio as a child). “I wanted Ellen for the last production of ‘Normal Heart’ at the Public Theater in 2004,” Kramer said, “but her monster zillionaire husband wouldn’t let her out of the house. So when this came along, I put her name forth immediately.”

When Barkin and I sat down to talk in her living room, she was dressed entirely in black, jewelry-free, and drank Diet Coke from a bottle. She is impossibly narrow-hipped (“I have skinny genes. My mother weighs 90 pounds”), and the crinkly-eyed smile and lopsided grin that long ago prompted one wag to describe her face as looking like “Diane Sawyer’s pressed against a windshield” are the very essence of her idiosyncratic spark, the one that makes it hard to take your eyes off her, the one her teachers were too dumb to see. Her raspy voice hasn’t changed through the years. She still sounds as if she just woke up, or just had sex, or maybe a whiskey.

The curtains and shutters stayed drawn. “I don’t like light,” she said. “I don’t like a view.” She does like flowers; vases were filled with gorgeous lavender roses. She also likes decorating. “The house is a combination of deco and midcentury furniture,” she said. We sat on a George Nelson couch under a Sally Mann photograph. In the next room she showed me two chairs with carved white wooden backs that were designed by W. Somerset Maugham’s wife, Syrie. Barkin spoke about her house and the things in it, not boastfully but like someone reassuring herself that it was actually all hers and that no one could take it away from her.

“I remember the original production of ‘The Normal Heart’ and the impact it had on me,” she said. “Part of the reason I got involved with this was because of Larry. They were fighting a war in 1981, Larry was fighting a war, and there are casualties in war. I am not by nature a pacifist, and so, good for him, because it worked. I remember my first friend who got sick. It was 1981, and the disease was called the gay cancer. I don’t think the word ‘AIDS’ came out until ’84. I just remember it being terrifying as more people got sick. We didn’t know how you could catch it, you heard all kinds of crazy things. Could you hug somebody who had this gay cancer because, What if they were perspiring? What if it was a mosquito from Haiti?”

“The Normal Heart” is scheduled to run for 12 weeks; if her pilot is picked up, Barkin would be free to join the series. “I’m what’s called a guest star, which means I’m not a regular character,” she said. “It will depend on how she is written into the story, but in terms of committing to 26 episodes, I’m not ready to spend my final act in L.A., thank you very much. I would love to do a television show in New York City.”

Barkin has made 44 feature films and 7 television movies so far, and she has worked with an eclectic range of directors, including Spike Lee, Todd Solondz, Tony Scott, Terry Gilliam, Mike Newell, Bob Rafelson, Blake Edwards, Jim Jarmusch and Sidney Lumet. She chooses only work that interests her, and most of her films have not been commercial hits, which is fine with her. All she cares about is that they have a fighting chance of being seen. In “Another Happy Day,” Barkin co-stars with Ellen Burstyn, Demi Moore and Kate Bosworth. “We did it in a relatively short period of time, two and a half years, from the minute the script was put in my hand until we went to Sundance,” she said. “That is amazing in the indie world, and part of that was due to my dog-with-a-bone determination. You struggle, you work and then what do you hope for? At the end of the day I’ve seen too many wonderful movies spend two weeks in a theater and you say, Where did that movie go? The industry is changing, and no one has figured it out. And when you make smaller movies, the pay decreases, so you have to work more. Who doesn’t want a TV show?”

Barkin famously managed to have a career without leaving her children to do it. Her son, Jack, is now 21 and a blues guitarist in a band called the Dough Rollers, which toured with Bob Dylan last summer. Her daughter, Romy, is set to go to college in the fall. “They’re great, they’re extraordinary and Gabriel and I really did it together,” she said. (Byrne has never remarried.) “We have every kid’s birthday together and both of our birthdays with the kids,” she went on. “Any time I cook a holiday meal, Gabriel comes here, and Christmas is usually his holiday, so then I go there. I know I’ve said this before, but I don’t think a marriage has to last forever to be successful, and I think we had a good marriage and we managed to keep what was good about it alive for 25 years. I have enormous respect for him, and I would say it’s reciprocated. He was extremely supportive of me during some very difficult times. And he’s a great father to our kids.” She smiled, sort of. “I kept every piece of jewelry he ever gave me.”

So these days, when she wakes up at 3 a.m. worrying about something, what is it?

“More like 6 in the morning,” she said. “I don’t worry about my children, which is a good thing. I guess I worry about weird existential things, like how do we spend our final act.” She got up and walked to an adjoining room to get another Diet Coke. “This is a very emotional question,” she called out. “I can’t answer it without crying.” When she sat back down, she wasn’t crying at all. “I think, You’re 56 years old, what did you do?” she continued. “You raised two good kids. What am I going to do now that is as meaningful as that? I don’t know the answer yet. I guess I’m up thinking, Am I too old to start to absorb new things?”

Photo

The other ex: Barkin with the actor Gabriel Byrne in 1990.Credit
Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

It was getting time to leave for her character meeting with George Wolfe. She’d made pea soup and a salad for us, downstairs in the kitchen, so we had a quick bite. “Bland,” she said of the soup — unfairly — adding more salt.

Barkin had worked with Wolfe a few times already, though the company had not yet begun to rehearse. She had been running her own lines independently and was practically off book. At Wolfe’s house, she sat opposite him and strapped a thick black belt around her ankles to channel her wheelchair-bound character. “I need to remember not to try to cross my legs or stand up,” she said.

Wolfe looked at her waterlogged script, her lines highlighted in yellow. “Did that get dropped in the tub?” he asked, and she nodded. “Exactly.” Before she started her speech, she turned abruptly in her chair. ”You have to move away from me,” she instructed. Once I complied, she created a narrow zone of concentration, focusing solely on Wolfe as they tackled her major scene, the frustrated doctor erupting at an incompetent government bureaucrat.

When she finished the speech, Wolfe said: “Good, good, good. This is a kind of breakthrough for her personally. You can smash that home if you want. I think the arrogance can come out.” She made notes in the margins.

In the second rendition, she was more emotional, tearing up at the end. “You know,“ she said, “once she gets going, there’s something evangelical about it.”

After the third time, Wolfe was pleased. “I think it’s becoming more specific,” he said. “There’s the emotional rhythm, but there’s also the thought process, and the thoughts are feeling more specific.” Barkin, who is extremely nearsighted, worried about wearing glasses onstage. “Without them I couldn’t discern acting, it’s all a blur,” she said. Wolfe tried on her glasses. “Whoa,” he said, handing them back. “Get them without rims so they don’t obscure your expression.”

Back on the street, Barkin offered to walk with me a while, out of her way. I had grown acclimated to the “push me, pull you” dynamic of the day, and I knew this was her way of making up for having been sharp with me during her scene work. I hadn’t minded, really. Watching her perform was energizing. She has read a lot, including Camus’s “Plague” and Randy Shilts’s “And the Band Played On,” to place her in the world of the play, to give context to the thought process Wolfe spoke of. The emotional rhythms take care of themselves, fueled by her personal reserves of anger and hurt. That her delivery was so instantly vivid, so deeply felt, was no accident.

Earlier in the day, when we finished eating and left her kitchen, we got to the stairs at the same time. I waited for her to lead the way up, but she shook her head impatiently. “Go,” she commanded. I obliged, though I must have looked surprised. Because a few steps later, she spoke softly to my back. “After you,” she amended.

Correction: April 24, 2011

An article on Page 24, about the actress Ellen Barkin, misstates the title of a book by Randy Shilts. It is “And the Band Played On,” not “As the Band Played On.”

Alex Witchel (a.witchel-MagGroup@nytimes.com) is a staff writer for the magazine. She writes the Feed Me column for the Dining section of The Times. Editor: Sheila Glaser (s.glaser-MagGroup@nytimes.com).

A version of this article appears in print on April 24, 2011, on page MM20 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The Return of Ellen Barkin. Today's Paper|Subscribe